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Saturday, July 19, 2014

I added a page to my blog about the Redcoat, for the benefit of the world and so I can keep looking at pictures of it, and flatter my own pride. It's an evolving page, but hopefully it will be helpful to someone. It's a seemingly unexplored realm in the blog world, tailcoat construction. Maybe I'm the only seamstress who googles things like "How to sew a Colonial Redcoat," but when I did, there just weren't any good blogs about the subject. Lots about Regency tailcoats, but not so much about 18th Century military tailcoats.

The Fs are back home, so I moved back home too. No mice here, but less privacy. I bought a new piece of furniture for my sewing room; a mammoth gorgeous wood thing that takes up a large amount of my old-woman-in-a-shoe room. We're also in the midst of burgeoning construction project, which is wonderful, but it means that there is dust simply all over the entire house.

The upstairs gets a new wall, and the rest of the house gets a layer of dust. My brain says yes but my sinuses say no.

Monday, July 14, 2014

This weekend I took a short road trip with the G family over to Clarinda, IA. Clarinda is a small town where their claim to fame is that Glenn Miller was born there back in 1904. It's also where my Grandfather was born in 1917, into a good, Scots-Presbyterian family. Every spring Clarinda has a Glenn Miller Festival where the best Big Bands come and play. There's also a Glenn Miller museum, which costs $6 per person, so we skipped it.

The Nodaway Museum on the edge of Clarinda is really neat. Besides several rather decrepit outbuildings, it's two big museum buildings put together, and a basement besides, just full of Prairie history. There's a quilt room with racks of impressive antique quilts, and a genealogy center. Donations are requested, but there is no set entrance fee. The museum is staffed by elderly volunteers, who were so friendly that we could hardly leave!

It was sunny, 91F and amazingly humid, so our trip largely ended up being us sitting in the air-conditioned car, looking at the various small towns out the window. We spent a fair amount of time in the extremely agricultural and obscure town of Red Oak. Who knew that Red Oak, IA had so many amazing houses? We drove through street block after street block of gorgeous late-Victorian mansions. The Gs, always on the lookout for morbid haunted houses, loved it.

This week I got invited to two Biblestudies. Monday was the charismatic Biblestudy, hallelujah, thank you Jesus! It was a small group of ladies, led by my Clothing Shed manager, reading through "The Bait of Satan." It was pretty basic, there was really nothing too shocking, and they all prayed for me that I would get a husband.

My current wholecloth quilt. It's pretty small.

Only once in a blue moon do I have a free Tuesday night, so this week with my free Tuesday night I went to a quilting group here in North Omaha. You know, when you take away the scary ethnically-diverse men with tattoos and chains, NorthO is really a lot of fun. The Golden Threads Quilting group meets at the Library every Tuesday evening, and they make quilts for people struggling with cancer. It was a fun bunch of older ladies(also ethnically diverse, but not scary) and some granddaughters.

Wednesday was the Young Adult Biblestudy. An older gentleman in my church has been telling me I should go for weeks now, so I figured I had to go at least once. I had preconceived notions of a group full of mid-twenties hipsters in skinny jeans and glasses. It turned out to be a more sportsy, tanned, and just out of college group. I hate to say it, but it was a little boring. When did my peers get so boring?

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Last night(It was a dark and stormy night) I could hear the mice in the bedroom. Remember, there were no less than seven mouse-traps in that room, which I don't think I will ever be able to sleep in again. After I heard two traps go off I carefully went to look.

And there was a mouse sitting calmly there on the floor next to the trap.

Fort Atkinson SHP: This weekend is a Living History weekend, the first one I'll be able to make this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

I suppose the practical, level-headed thing to do would have been to grab something and smack the mouse. I do consider myself, generally, a calm, level-headed person; but one cannot be practical and level-headed ALL the time. I thought, well, they set off two traps; there's five left. Odds are against them. And sure enough, next morning's investigation showed two dead mice. Well, almost dead. One was in a sticky trap(no, I am not humane) and the other was just lying on the floor. Not sure what that's about since I didn't use poison; but as long as it's dead oh well.

It's all just so disgusting. Mice are creepy and dirty and gross and loud and NOCTURNAL and I certainly don't ever want to touch a live or a dead one! Am I being too dramatic? I don't think so. I'm still not sure what will happen to the bodies; I'm only here for another two weeks. How fast do they decompose, I wonder?

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

I'm currently house-sitting for friends, just for two weeks this time. They've been fighting a resilient mouse population for some time, which battle I naively believed to be confined to the kitchen. Sunday night debunked that myth. The horde decided the bedroom was more interesting. The amount of scrabbling was enough to keep me awake until early morning when I gave up and moved to another room. Yes, I surrendered.

Picking Cherries in the rain last weekend. No, I did not climb the tree.

When the morning came around I(sleep-deprived and exhausted) went with vengeful thoughts and bought a hand-full of mousetraps. I set no less then seven traps in that bedroom, but didn't catch a thing. Now I'm wondering, where are they now?

About the Small Servant

I sew for money! Contact for inquiries: emilyjoyd@gmail.com
"This Marchioness," said Mr. Swiveller, folding his arms, "Is a very extraordinary person- surrounded by mysteries, ignorant of the taste of beer, unacquainted with her own name(which is less remarkable), and taking a limited view of society through the keyholes of doors- can these things be her destiny, or has some unknown person started an opposition to the decrees of fate! It is a most unscrutable and unmitigated staggerer!
-Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens